facet

> facet is a library for Rust which provides run-time reflection. By annotating your struct with #[derive(facet::Facet)], you get a SHAPE associated type which can be inspected at runtime. https://github.com/facet-rs/facet > The core crates give types a SHAPE associated constant with their kind, layout, fields, documentation, attributes, and type-specific operations. facet-reflect builds, reads, and mutates values through those shapes while preserving their invariants. > Serialization and integration crates build on that reflection layer: JSON, TOML, YAML, MessagePack, Postcard, ASN.1, XDR, CSV, XML, URL-encoded forms, SQLite, Axum, schema generation, structural diffing, and more. Side by side comparison with SERDE https://facet.rs/guide/serde/

I’m not a fan of serde either. I wish there was a way to have foreign derives (or even better: compile-time reflection). There wasn’t a great way to serialize things in Rust in the standard library and the ecosystem crystalized around serde, which is suboptimal imo. There are libraries like facet[0] that implement general reflection, rather than just a subset of it, but it probably won't be supported by all of your dependencies. [0] https://github.com/facet-rs/facet

OT: I really like Li Haoyi's work in the Scala community, trying to bring Python's straightforward programming model to Scala. I've been wondering if there is an equivalent in the Rust ecosystem. I think https://github.com/facet-rs/facet is going in the right direction